...My dad was 60 when I was born, and I have a significant and unexpectedly hard-to-manage autoimmune disorder. I also have ridiculously proliferate allergies and random other health problems.

There's no other history of ANY of these health problems anywhere else in my family. I wonder if my dad's age was part of the problem.

Every Sperm is sacred,

Every sperm is great.

If a sperm is wasted,

God get's quite irrate.

I'm completely done attacking this forum. It's too easy.

my favorite quote from my time here:

"arm wrestle anyone"???

-from like 2 weeks ago. genious.

as everyone with kids knows, it's the age of your knees.

"It makes no sense, after all, that aging -- which takes a toll on all the body's cells -- would somehow leave sperm totally intact"

While that may seem logical, the difference between eggs and sperm is that sperm are constantly being re-made. Women become infertile with age because their eggs get old and eventually their ovaries stop ovulating viable specimens. Unlike eggs, which develop in their initial form in the fetus, sperm don't age. I can believe that, the older the source of the gametes, the more likely you are to have *some* genetic errors, but sperm themselves are, by definition, very young if they're still alive and unfrozen.

Age of your knees! That's a good one! :)

Anyway, the point is to keep the risks and downsides in perspective. If the risk of something bad goes from 0.2 percent to, say, 1.0 percent, that's a five-fold increase, but it remains a very low risk overall. You get the picture.

Having kids when you're young has its pros and cons, and having them when you're older has its pros and cons. I wish I'd had mine earlier, but that's only because I didn't know then what I know now, that motherhood is (for me) fun.

but a woman needs a healthy body to carry the baby. Apparently screening of older women's pregnancies has been so effective in reducing the number of Downs syndrome babies they give birth to that the problem is now almost exclusively among the younger unscreened mothers, and screening has now been recommended for all. There's a big lesson there.

A woman is born with all the ova she'll ever have, while sperm are generated throughout a man's life. So it used to be thought that, while eggs got old, sperm didn't. Bad assumption; it seems that genetic damage accumulates in the precursor cells that divide to form the sperm cells, so even though the sperm is "new," its DNA isn't.

This has been known for several years, so the news here is hardly surprising.

Catherine there is an extensive body of research that has been done over the years about the hazards to the offspring of older fathers. Here is a small sample of the papers and articles written on the subject:

The High Rate of Spontaneous Mutation: Is it a health risk? By geneticist James F. Crow was written in 1994

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/94/16/8380

The longterm effects of delayed parenthood written in 1998.http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/13/9/2371.pdf

Scientists have been studying sperm and ageing. Narendra P. Singh et al. has not receivedd funding to do a larger study on his finding from 2002.

"Effects of age on DNA double-strand breaks and apoptosis in human sperm."

"This study clearly demonstrates an increase in sperm double-stranded DNA breaks with age. Our findings also suggest for the first time an age-related decrease in human sperm apoptosis. These novel findings may indicate deterioration of healthy sperm cell selection process with age."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021126201311.htm

Dr. Philip Gorwood would like cooperation from researchers in the field of schizophrenia so that an impact could be made on public health.

"Paternal ages below or above 35 years old are associated with a different risk of schizophrenia in the offspring."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=17142012

Epidemiologists have called for a discussion in their article, "Advanced Paternal Age is it a health risk?"http://press.psprings.co.uk/jech/october/851_ch45179.pdf

The late Dr. Leslie B. Raschka wrote, "The Age of the Father and The Health of Future Generations" M.D.:http://ageofthefatherandhealthoffuture.blogspot.com/

Ethylin Jabs, M.D. of Johns Hopkins said, says Ethylin Jabs, M.D., director of the Center for Craniofacial Development and Disorders at Johns Hopkins.

"Importantly, disorders linked to advancing paternal age begin to increase rapidly at about the same time as maternal risks increase -- age 33 to 35. Until now, the only evidence for paternal age effects has come from determining how many children with these diseases are born to fathers of various ages"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/10/021018080014.htm

THIS BODY OF WORK REMAINS BELOW THE RADAR SCREEN

Sperms are young but they are synthesized by mechanisms that starts to degenerate. Our body is a self-destructive biological machine and it cannot repair itself at older age. Generating eggs (as in the case of women) when it is not strong enough to produce a healthy child is equally meaningless. For men, from sperm one can tell the age of a person although the sperm itself is only few days old. So, the clock issue is really unfair to women but at the root of the matter is the fact that they are in risk because of being career for the baby. As a evolutionary trend, mens' reproductive decay is less visible because the role of male counterpart is relatively less involved except transfer of tiny amount of genetic material. Still, the genetic material, the mechanisms to replicate same proteins million times start to have more errors and as a result the sperm will have more defects. The baby will be more healthy compared to what it started with because the newborn is again a new biological machine with capability to corrent itself. So, many of these defects will be corrected again. Still there is a chance that all of these are not repairable by the baby's new genetic material. So, in summary, it is more rational if you have the health of the child as the center of this issue and then decide on taking the risk.